Sheridan, Bolt and Co: the real butchers of Iraq
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To celebrate five years of The Best War Ever, The Australian today republishes a Christopher Hitchens column from Slate, a piece entitled: “How did I get the Iraq war so wrong? I didn’t”. The naïve reader might conclude that, back in 2003, Hitch calculated that an invasion would kill hundreds of thousands of people, spread millions of refugees throughout the Middle East, Balkanise Iraq, foster terrorism around the world and cost the US a trillion dollars – and then said, hell yeah, let’s do it! Via the miracle of the intertubes, we can discover that, actually, Hitchens promised something quite different. But why play this game with an import? Let’s bring out Mr Oopsie McSlippy Mistakeowitz himself, The Oz’s own Greg Sheridan. It was Sheridan, after all, who announced several times that Saddam possessed WMDs – “tons of nerve gas and biological agents”, to be precise. It was Sheridan who explained how an invasion of Iraq would “discredit extremism and hasten Israeli-Palestinian peace.” And it was Sheridan who saw the invasion as vindicating, of all people, Donald Rumsfeld. As he wrote on 11 April, 2003:
Five years on, Rumsfeld has resigned in disgrace – but Greg Sheridan remains foreign editor for Australia’s national newspaper, spreading stupidity over the world like a blanket. In his defence, you might argue that Sheridan was not the worst of the Australian media warmongers, an honour that surely belongs to the Herald Sun’s Andrew Bolt. These days, Bolt spends most of his time talking climate change, seeking, it seems, to do to the ozone layer what he and his friends did to Iraq. But, if you’ve access to newspaper archives, it’s worth pulling up Bolt’s columns from this time five years ago: each article a minor masterpiece of sophistry and self-delusion. Take his column from 20 April 2003. In it, he declares the “war in Iraq won well” and then announces the opening of a new front: “Let’s move on to the next war – a war for our culture. A war for truth, rationality, humanity, democracy and wisdom. Let the accountability begin.” He goes on to ridicule, by name, the opponents of the invasion: Simon Crean for seeing no evidence of links between terrorists and Saddam, Carmen Lawrence for predicting a death toll of 480,000, Bob Brown for expecting 100,000 deaths of children and 900,000 refugees, Paul Dibb for anticipating “cholera or typhoid” and “street-by-street fighting with enormous casualties”, the Australian Sociological Association for claiming the invasion would be “responsible for the probable loss of 100,000 civilians”, Robert Manne for saying perhaps “hundreds of thousands of Iraqis” would be killed, Amin Saikal for warning “Baghdad will be turned into a bloodbath”, Andrew Vincent for anticipating “absolute chaos, I think, in the whole of the Middle East and the Muslim world” and so on. Boy, are their faces red now or what! It’s an interesting column to revisit on this anniversary since it reminds us that, in 2003, many, many people forecast the coming disaster with a fair degree of accuracy. Andrew Bolt was not among them. Yet he, like Sheridan and Hitchens, sails serenely on, his career entirely unimpeded by his role in one of the greatest humanitarian catastrophes of a generation. Unfortunately, the people of Iraq can’t do the same.
Jeff Sparrow is the editor of Overland. |
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26 Comments
Bolt is inaccurate, derisive of research, a pretentious sh*t, self indulgent, verbose and mentally lazy. He is a disgrace to professional journalism. But hey, he’s got the backing of Rupert Murdoch has he not?
“Mr Oopsie McSlippy Mistakeowitz” - it’s only funny because it is true.
John James — at least our “left wing trash” is out there for everyone to read. How about spelling out your right wing rubbish rather than keeping it to yourself and resorting to invective instead?
confronting the Americans and their muslim allies. More power to the Americans who are the only nation willing to shoulder the burden. We should be reinforcing our garrisons, not withdrawing! The Americans will confront the Iranians and their surrogates,
The likes of Hitchens, Sheridan & Bolt are too opinionated to ever admit mistakes. The plain fact is that the Iraq invasion is one of the greatest geopolitical mistakes of all time. Bush, Cheney & Blair should be behind bars.
Nice one. I’d read Hitchens on the bus this morning and suspected his tune had modified over time, thanks for linking his 2003 article.
bizarre? what’s bizarre is a serious lack of compassion,empathy or understanding of what horrendous things that people in iraq & afghanistan are going through at the hands of your infallable & perfect in all ways USofA.lefty?nah mate just a caring human.
A fitting way to mark the 5 years of TWAT ( the war against terror). If goebbels had survived WWII, would he not have been prosecuted for war crimes against humanity? Bolt I despise, he was surely the most mendacious of the lot. A good article, Jeff.
over 1 million dead iraqis,$1 trillion dollars wasted,lies,deceit,torture,rendtions,enemy combatants-who are the real terrorists here? we abhor the war in iraq does not=support for islamic extremism. just recognise that US state terror is exactly the same
With pleasure Frank! Over the 5 years since the conflict began, we have watched innocent aid workers and construction workers beheaded on camera as a lesson to the ” crusaders”. We cannot allow these people to prevail. The atrocities in Darfur,..
Thanks for the article - these people need to be called on their constant mistakes. How can these “serious commentators” consistently be so wrong still get any respect, not to mention ongoing employment?
I sat in an office in April 2003, frustrated by certain individuals educating themselves with world events by the writers of the Herald Sun. Unfortunately, people by their fear, subscribe to information that strengthens their beliefs…deluded or not.
Yes, the tragedy is that these clowns are doing what they do with hidden agendas, not reporting, but distorting to swing opinion in certain directions, in accordance with the twisted world views of their masters. There’s no objectivity or scholarship here
Sorry John, this is not the place for a global rant. Jeff’s piece and related comments concerned the Iraq invasion. This was illegal, a war crime, dishonest & deceitful in that “shouldering the burden” consisted of securing ME oil via a permanent base ..
I didn’t have the space left to say. “Terrific article, thanks Jeff”.
John James, no-one in their right mind would describe Hitchins as of “the left” these days and his gin-sodden brain - that merely explains his political arguments over the last 10 years. Hitchins is as much a neo-con as Bush and Cheney. Bolt is an idiot
Bizarre reasoning and so typical of the left. Until the Soviet Union was attacked by Hitler, the official left wing assessment of the Allied war effort against Hitler was that it was an “imperialist war of aggression”. Same ‘Loony Left’ reasoning.
Franck Birchall thinks Bush, Cheney and Blair should be behind bars - have you forgotten John Howard was right in there dabbling his hands in the blood of the Iraqi civilians and shouting “Me too George I’m right beside you”. His party supported him.
Even a gin sodden old trotskyist like Hitchens can see through this left wing trash!
Hey, Nic’s right - ozone isn’t directly related to greenhouse… let’s invade Iraq!
complicity - pure & simple. JJ is so stuck in the cold war era, if he loves war, death & destruction so much go to the US & sign up. 4000 dead Gi’s & 30,000 wounded can’t be wrong! warmongering mouthfoamers like you make us sick. polarised idiotic debates
Hezbollah and Hamas who are raining rockets on unarmed civilians in the only genuine democracy in the Middle East, the State of Israel. As usual , the Left are allied with the cut-throats, dictators and thugs attacking liberal democracy.
Frank, this is a global conflict. That is what the Left has to grasp. The ” if we keep our heads down they’ll leave us alone” school of foreign policy is foolish and dangerous, but typical of the Left.
the killing of commuters in London and Madrid, the butchering of school childern and their mothers in Russia, the slaughtering of young kids having a drink in Bali, the mudering of Jordanians at a wedding, all carried out by the same movement..
What does the ozone layer have to do with climate change? Is a mistake of this magnitude reflective of the quality of the rest of your piece?
OK John, please explain why the so-called “global conflict” required Iraq to be invaded when one of the many terrible consequences was that Iraq thereby became a magnet for al Qaeda insurgents.